Letters to the Editor: When we set out to build peace, we are all apprentices

One reader reflects on the meaning of the late Gerald Goldberg's work in terms of the North and Palestine, while others consider issues including sport, religion, and politics

Cork's first Jewish lord mayor Gerald Goldberg pictured in 1977. Irish Examiner Archive 

Many tributes are paid to the late Gerald Goldberg in a series of essays in Gerald Goldberg — A Tribute (edited by Dermot Keogh and Diarmuid Whelan, Mercier Press 2008). In one, Jack Phelan writes: “Following his days at UCC, Gerald was apprenticed to a Cork solicitor. Nowadays, the term ‘apprentice’ has fallen out of favour in the corridors of the Law Society, and young people who aspire to be solicitors are encouraged to call themselves ‘trainee solicitors’ — which in my opinion they are not.”

I was lucky to have spent some of my apprenticeship in the 1960s on block-release courses attending the then-newly opened School of Furniture in St John’s Rectory in 1963, across from the Victoria Hospital.